Demise of the BCS is imminent

Aug. 29, 2013

Written by

George Schroeder

USA Today

Former Oregon football coach Mike Bellotti called it “a cancer.” When Pete Carroll was at USC, he said “it stinks.” Thinking back to his time as the coach at Auburn, Tommy Tuberville once said, “It still kills me”.

“It” is not a disease or a plague, but the Bowl Championship Series.

Bellotti, Carroll and Tuberville are far from the only coaches or players who have been left puzzled and perturbed by the BCS’ confounding formula. If they still hold a grudge, certainly many college football fans would understand.

As the 16th and final season of the BCS era started Thursday, the sound you heard was applause. For the return of college football, certainly . But also for the imminent demise of a controversial postseason structure. Beginning in 2014, the College Football Playoff starts with a four-team bracket chosen by a selection committee.

Despite the bland name, there’s plenty of anticipation for the long-awaited change. Still, given what ailed the BCS, it’s hard to know if the playoff will in the long run be seen as a cure.

Consider the playoff’s selection committee, which loosely will be modeled on the panel of college athletic officials who fill out the bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament each March. The concept sounds great: a group of knowledgeable football people supplanting polls and computer ratings, until your favorite team gets snubbed — when, say, the first major conference champion is edged out by a second-place team from another league, or when that consensus No. 3 team in the polls is No. 5 in the committee’s thinking. Pick a scenario and it will be controversial.

But is that a bad thing? Is it just possible, as BCS executive director Bill Hancock said, we’ll fondly remember the BCS, controversy and all?

“I think history will see that it contributed to the regular season in a way that nobody ever imagined,” Hancock said, “and it brought order to the postseason.”

Controversial, but better?

The BCS’ formula sometimes seemed more like chaos. But for all its faults, its defenders said it was first and foremost a dramatic improvement from the previous system, which frequently failed to match the two highest-ranked teams in the country in a head-to-head championship. Bellotti said the BCS eventually “got it right most of the time,” adding: “I think at some point in time, people will remember the BCS in a positive manner. Maybe not for a long time.”

Created in 1998 with the goal of matching two teams for an undisputed national championship game, the BCS mostly achieved it. The Associated Press began ranking teams in 1936, but the Nos. 1 and 2 ranked teams met only eight times in the next 56 years in postseason bowl games. Then came the Bowl Coalition in 1992, followed briefly by the Bowl Alliance. Then when the Big Ten Conference, Pac-10 Conference and Rose Bowl joined in 1998, the BCS. The AP’s top two-ranked teams have met 12 times in 15 BCS championship games.

“The championship game was the objective,” said Chuck Neinas, a longtime college athletics administrator who most recently served as interim commissioner of the Big 12 Conference, “and that was satisfied. There’s a case that could be made that on occasions, maybe they didn’t. I think in the main, they did pretty well.”

We recall the misses, however. Like when Bellotti’s Ducks — ranked No. 2 in the polls in 2001 — were left out in favor of a Nebraska team that hadn’t won its division of the Big 12, much less the conference title, and was coming off a 62-36 loss to Colorado in the regular-season finale. Or two years later, when Oklahoma lost to Kansas State in the Big 12 championship but played LSU in the BCS championship game, anyway instead of USC, which happened to be the AP’s top-ranked team.

Or a year later, when there wasn’t room for undefeated Auburn because USC and Oklahoma — also undefeated — started the season ranked Nos. 1 and 2 and stayed that way. Although there were tweaks to the formula along the way — probably too many, and too reactionary, Hancock admits — Bellotti probably spoke for many, then and now, when he likened the system to cancer, “because until it strikes you, you don’t know how bad it feels.”

Through the years, the BCS became a toxic topic. The abbreviation — sometimes, people removed the middle letter — served as evergreen fodder for sports-talk radio. Just a mention would light up phone lines. It fueled blogs, columns and mainstream TV.

Mostly, the contempt was reserved for the BCS formula, tweaked through the years until it reached its current composition: Two parts human polls (the USA Today Coaches Poll and the Harris Interactive College Football Poll), one part an average of six computer rankings. At various times, fans railed against the unseeing computers or the biased voters, and sometimes both.

Although controversy was an unwanted byproduct, the popularity of college football was growing exponentially — which was, according to BCS founders, an unsuspected benefit.

“I thought the BCS added more than people could ever put a value on because of this: It turned the entire season into a playoff,” Arkansas coach Bret Bielema said. “It created that much energy that people were glued to those TVs from Week 1 to Week 13, and everywhere in between.”

That’s shown in increasing TV ratings, one metric that shows college football now ranking behind the NFL as America’s second favorite sport. There were tangible measurements, too, in the ever-expanding athletic department budgets, which were driven by skyrocketing TV contracts.

Take, for example, the Southeastern Conference. As its schools have won seven consecutive BCS championships, the conference has reaped the financial benefits. In May, it announced a record $289.4 million distribution to its members in 2012-13, an average of $20.7 million per school. In 2009, the SEC payday was $132.5 million ($11 million per school). The revenue should only grow with the addition of the SEC Network in 2014 and with the advent of the playoff.

“We can’t take all the credit for that, of course,” Hancock said of the financial windfall in the sport. “There were other factors. But the BCS was a significant factor in making it a national game more than ever before. Suddenly, people in the SEC had to pay attention to Boise State. People in Oregon had to pay attention to Alabama. None of the founding fathers anticipated that. They thought they were just changing the procedures so they could put (Nos.) 1 vs. 2 in a bowl game.”

Championship windfall

There were other unintended consequences. If fans’ focus is more national now, there has been a corresponding loss — or devaluation — of conference championships, except as a means to an end. The radical realignment of conference membership the past few years was driven by TV revenue, but also by schools’ desire to be best positioned for college football’s postseason.

TV revenue, as it turned out, changed everyone’s postseason position. For much of the BCS’ tenure, most of the folks who ran the sport refused to countenance the idea of a playoff — even shooting down in 2008 a proposal championed by the SEC for a four-team tournament. Dubbed the “plus-one” because it would utilize the existing BCS bowls as semifinal hosts, then add a game, it closely resembled the coming College Football Playoff. But five years ago it found no traction.

In January 2012, however, shortly after Alabama pounded LSU into submission in the BCS championship the conference commissioners huddled with purpose. A few short months later, they emerged after a series of meetings with the four-team playoff model. There were several factors in the sea change, but one was familiar:

“The No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, No. 4 and No. 5 reason is money,” said Dan Wetzel, national columnist for Yahoo! Sports and co-author of the 2010 book “Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series.” “It’s the reason everything changes in America.”

Teams participating in BCS bowls after the 2012 season received a payout of as much as $23.6 million, but that is a fraction the future payday. ESPN bought the rights to the College Football Playoff for $7.3 billion during 12 years. Such an expenditure means the largest, most successful conferences could average more than $100 million per year in revenue — not including their regular-season TV deals.

Despite assurances from conference commissioners the playoff will not expand for at least the life of the TV contract, the financial potential is one reason calls to expand the bracket to eight teams — which already are being made — shouldn’t be dismissed.

With the money might have come another unintended consequence. The NCAA’s amateurism model is under increasing assault in public perception (and tangibly, from several lawsuits). Amid all that cash, it’s harder to square with the notion players should simply play for an education and the love of the game. Could the College Football Playoff eventually be played under a radically different economic model? If so, the BCS will be seen as a bridge to more than just a different postseason structure.

As the final season of the BCS era starts this weekend, the specter of what comes next looms just over the horizon. Although Hancock insists this season won’t be overshadowed, part of the reason there won’t be a mock run by a selection committee — which could be useful to work out the kinks in a brand new process — is an attempt to avoid exactly the type of speculation commissioners already know is coming.

As the calendar rolls into late November and contenders maneuver for one of the two berths in this season’s championship, we’ll all wonder which other teams would, could, or should be slotted in, too, and how they would fare if given the opportunity. If history is guide, there might be fierce debate.

Then in 2014, we’ll do it for real. Bellotti thinks he has a pretty good idea of what will happen.